A career-spanning look at one of Aotearoa’s most important living artists.

For over thirty years Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine, Te Uri Taniwha) has developed a rigorous and evolving painting practice, using the medium to layer the visual languages through which Aotearoa can be seen and understood.

In this book leading art writer Anthony Byrt takes us on a voyage into Te Tai Tokerau to unravel the relationships, landscapes and histories that are the wellspring of Cotton’s art – the world of Kororāreka and Hongi Hika, of mission stations, revolutionary religious ideas and Te Tiriti. By travelling deep into Cotton’s visual universe, Byrt helps us make sense of the paintings and the world-changing collisions that occurred in the nineteenth-century North – collisions that still shape Aotearoa today.

Working through the remarkable range of Shane Cotton’s work, this is a vital, expansive and necessary account of one of the country’s most important living artists.

Author

Anthony Byrt is an award-winning New Zealand author, critic and journalist. His first book, This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art (AUP, 2016), was shortlisted in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2017. His second, The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London, 1962 (AUP, 2020), was longlisted for the same prize in 2021. Byrt’s whakapapa ties him to Ngāti Kahu ki Whaingaroa and the Dalmatian gumdiggers who settled later in Te Tai Tokerau. He currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne with his family and has recently published his first novel, Dying Days (Affirm Press).

Artist

Shane Cotton ONZM was born in Upper Hutt with Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha iwi affiliations. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts in 1988 and a Graduate Diploma in Teaching from the Christchurch College of Education in 1991. In 1993, he joined Robert Jahnke in lecturing on Massey University’s Toioho ki Āpiti Bachelor of Māori Visual Arts programme. In 2005, he left the university to paint full time.

His painting practice examines the visual consequences of the nineteenth-century collision between Māori and Pākehā cultural and spiritual systems. Drawing particularly on Māori art’s intersections with Christianity, as well as his own whakapapa and the histories of Te Tai Tokerau, his work prompts vital conversations about nationhood and biculturalism.

In 1998, Cotton was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago and received the Seppelt Contemporary Art Award from the MCA in Sydney; he became an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2008 and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the visual arts, in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours.

Endorsements

‘Anthony Byrt, a son of Te Tai Tokerau, weaves together multiple lines of whakapapa in his latest book about his whanaunga, Shane Cotton. It is simultaneously a history book, an art book, a whakapapa book, an autobiography, which together demonstrate the richness and diversity of Cotton’s practice, and Byrt’s power to engage the audience on different levels. Troubling and engaging, Shane Cotton will leave the reader wanting to do their own tour of the North following the paths of the artworks.’ — Professor Ngarino Ellis, Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland

‘A compelling meditation on contemporary art, ancestry and place, this book traces in Shane Cotton’s painting a language equal to the deep time of Te Tai Tokerau, the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand. From local road trips taken with the artist to mapping his participation in global conversations about indigeneity, Anthony Byrt writes about Cotton’s work with intelligence and wit. The result is an approach to one of New Zealand’s most important living artists that’s both grounded and expansive, and which locates a starting point for creativity at the magic place “where sky and sea meet”.’ — Lara Strongman, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

‘This book is a revelation. It documents more than three decades of Cotton’s work, brilliantly illuminated by Byrt’s text. Probing the history of colonial resistance in the North, where both are from, it goes to the heart of what made this country what it is today. It will shake you up. It shook me up.’ — Professor Peter Brunt, Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington